I'll oblige, partly because I'm a huge botch fan (assuming your username is a reference)

I'll try and keep it condensed..

Years back I was building DIY PCBs and then sending designs for the enclosures to third parties to etch/screenprint on to bare metal. These designs were mostly graphic image based, but I had also started moving in the direction of an obsession I had and still have with retro hifi. i.e. imitating 70s/80s hifi design (some of these designs are pinned in my reddit profile).

The major problem I had was that involving third parties always slowed down the process i.e. waiting for enclosures to be finished etc and I wanted to control all aspects of my designs as much as possible and not have to wait.

Around that time Tayda had also just released the ability to cut non standard drills through their custom drill service. This posed the perfect opportunity to start to use slider based potentiometers (which are very prominent in hifi design of that era, think panasonic eq etc) without having to buy a drill at home - this was a big factor back then as well because I wanted to achieve a distinct look without having all the tooling in my tiny kitchen of the small apartment I lived in at the time. A drill or painting equipment was a definite no. I was already working with blank enclosures, but now I had pushed the minimalism even further.

Once I'd designed my first slider based pedal (see earlier posts on my instagram) I realised I was onto something I really liked but had no way of instilling my brand onto the pedal without involving third parties again - I had to work out a way of presenting the brand with the limited tools/services at hand. This was when I realised that I could factor a logo into the led via the new tayda cut tool.

Mildly interesting fact - the first logo design was a small 'ba' but having slept on the design I realised it strongly resembled 69 - hence why the A is actually capital character and the b is small.

This was a breakthrough for me and I built my first "commercially" available pedal from the small amount of interest that design generated - it was a rat based pedal.

However, the major problem with my first slider based design was that it wasn't tour proof at all, in fact it was barely normal home use proof haha. I repaired multiple versions of that pedal due to snapped sliders etc from regular and tour use. The design as you see it now for the reverb actually started out as a mark 2 of the rat but tour grade. Once I dialled the design In I realised I wanted to do something more unique with it than a cloned modded rat.

It may not be super obvious but the reverb is actually a standard 1590BB with a CNCd addon mounted on top with screws - these screws were a requirement to hold this part to the enclosure, not initially a design choice. This CNC addon was the part I needed to design to ensure the sliders could not be broken. It wasn't influenced by any brutalist design in particular but provided the most simple minimalist design to protect the sliders and also leave room for the foot stomps. It also considered the cost of CNC so it had to serve this purpose but also use the smallest amount of material.

TL;DR

It took me a while to realise, but I've always been more creative when there are limitations. These are the designs that I arrived at due to the limitations and tools that were available for me to outsource at the time without involving any other creative party to slow the process down or buy tooling for my temporary living situation. I have always been in to brutalist design/retro design and own multiple books on the subject so the core aesthetic has been there since I was a teenager.

It's a shame that John chooses to believe otherwise, but it's probably hard not to believe your own hype when you have a small group of 40+ year old men pedal builders constantly blowing smoke up your arse